Community Foundation: Building a better Greater New Haven for nearly a century

By Sarah Page Kyrcz

Updated
1:49 pm EDT, Monday, July 23, 2018

In this file photo, William Ginsberg, president and CEO of The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, glances at old photographs of 692 Orchard St. in New Haven during a celebration of the completion of the home by the Beulah Land Development Corp. in 2010. less

In this file photo, William Ginsberg, president and CEO of The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, glances at old photographs of 692 Orchard St. in New Haven during a celebration of the completion of ... more

Photo: Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media File Photo

Photo: Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media File Photo

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In this file photo, William Ginsberg, president and CEO of The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, glances at old photographs of 692 Orchard St. in New Haven during a celebration of the completion of the home by the Beulah Land Development Corp. in 2010. less

In this file photo, William Ginsberg, president and CEO of The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, glances at old photographs of 692 Orchard St. in New Haven during a celebration of the completion of ... more

Photo: Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media File Photo

Community Foundation: Building a better Greater New Haven for nearly a century

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Editor’s note: This is the 27th story in the Register’s Top 50 series.

NEW HAVEN — The year was 1928 and the country was on the verge of the great stock market crash of 1929, which signaled the beginning of the 12-year Great Depression.

But this was also the year that The New Haven Foundation was started with a gift of $135,000. This followed in the footsteps of the creation of the first charitable foundation in the country on Jan. 2, 1914, the Cleveland Foundation.

Endowing such a foundation was a simple and affordable way for individuals to leave a charitable legacy and, while the name was changed to the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven in 1991, the mission has remained the same.

Philanthropy and connections

“We want to see people to engage in the life of the local community, to support the local community,” said William Ginsberg, president and CEO of the Foundation.

“Community is all about connecting,” he said. “It’s not just 650,000 people, living in 20 towns in South Central Connecticut. It’s about the connections people feel to one another, to this place, to its history, to its future, to nonprofit organizations that exist here and things they want to see here in the future.”

“We are the intermediary between donors and nonprofits, between the aspirations of people and resources and the issues and opportunities that exist in this community,” he added.

The organization has stayed true to its original goal to be good stewards of the money donated by its benefactors.

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“To create a permanent charitable vehicle that could benefit the community over time and be a way in which people who were of this community, committed to this community, wanted to support this community not only in their life, but after they were gone,” Ginsberg said.

Thinking ahead

Visitors who walk into the Foundation’s Audubon Street offices are immediately greeted by the words that created the first fund that was established with the donation of nearly $135,000 from Nettie J. Dayton’s estate.

“I give and bequeath … in trust for the public, charitable and educational uses and purposes … creating the New Haven Foundation,” were words for the Nettie J. Dayton Fund.

Dayton was unmarried and died at age 53. While much of her life is a mystery, it is believed that she must have lived comfortably amid the lawyers, bankers, and other professionals who managed the family assets.

Dayton’s fund was unrestricted and could be used for any purposes that the organization decided needed to be addressed at that time.

Osborne A. Day, a lawyer and bank executive, was one of a small group that publicly launched The New Haven Foundation in February 1928, at a dinner at the New Haven Lawn Club.

The guest speaker that evening, New York Community Trust Director Ralph Hays, was quoted in the New Haven Register as saying, “the wisdom of having bequests administered at the discretion of a group of competent and far-seeing men, able to take into account such exigency created by the passing of time, so that no bequest might become moribund and useless due to the short-sighted discretion of a man long since in his grave.”

The New Haven Foundation modeled itself after Cleveland, making necessary local changes along the way, and many groups were involved. The Distribution Committee was created with trustees appointing two members; and the judge of the New Haven Probate Court, the mayor of New Haven, the president of Yale, the New Haven County Bar Association and the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce each appointing one member.

On May, 21, 1928, Day completed those appointments and announced to his colleagues, “Your committee now feels that The New Haven Foundation has been definitely launched.”

Shortly after, in 1930, the first grant was made to the Family Placement Bureau, made up of the Family Society, the Catholic Social Service Bureau and the Jewish Welfare Society to meet the unemployment crisis caused by the Depression.

In the same year, the Foundation appointed a Cancer Control Committee and allocated $5,000 for an experimental program to reduce cancer cases.

In the early years, many organizations benefited or were created from the generosity of donors. These included the Dental Society of New Haven, which provided free dental treatment; the creation of the New Haven Social Hygiene Association, which provided a series of public lectures; the Special Committee on Milk Distribution of the Council of Social Agencies, supplying milk to undernourished schoolchildren; and, in 1945 the New Haven Symphony Pops concerts began with the Foundation’s support.

In 1942, Caroline Silverthau created the Silverthau Fund “to provide milk and coal for the poor.” The family owned a jewelry store in New Haven’s Ninth Square.

The creation of the Foundation during a tumultuous period in the country’s history is an important part of its history. The Silverthau Fund was only the Foundation’s seventh fund.

“It grew very slowly, not surprisingly,” said Ginsberg. “First of all, it was founded in 1928 and then the economy crashed in 1929.

“People were selling apples on streetcorners,” he added, “not setting up charitable

funds. It was not a prosperous time, obviously.”

Giving grew

Fast forward to the 1950s with a bequest of $4 million — $2 million each from two brothers, Ross and Frank Gates. Today, the Gates Fund, at $30 million, is the single largest permanent asset of the Foundation.

These brothers were the last generation of a prominent Derby family that ran a manufacturing business.

The trusts established The Gates Fund with The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven “to the benefit of the inhabitants in the vicinity of Derby, Connecticut.” Created over a half-century ago, the Gates Fund continues to distribute substantial resources for the benefit of the Lower Naugatuck Valley, including Derby, Seymour, Ansonia, Shelton and Oxford.

Ginsberg uses the Gates Fund to illustrate the slow growth of the Foundation in the early years.

“When those bequests came in, the New Haven Foundation had $2 million, which went to $4 million and then went to $6 million,” said Ginsberg. “We’re talking the early 1950s. This foundation was 25 years old and it had $2 million, that’s an illustration when I say it grew slowly at the outset.”

Until the 1960s, the Foundation was entirely run by volunteers. It now has a paid staff and an 11-member board of directors.

The Foundation works hard to include a whole range of charitable activity in its work. This includes arts and culture, education, youth, civic engagement, basic needs and health.

“The role of the Foundation, as the resources of the Foundation have changed over the years and they’ve grown dramatically now to about $625 million with roughly 1,000 charitable funds, has changed accordingly,” Ginsberg said.

Further, the New Haven Promise scholarship program, which serves all qualifying city resident students, was created in partnership by the Foundation, Yale University and the New Haven Board of Education. It is the Foundation’s largest programmatic commitment, a spokeswoman said. The Community Foundation has provided about $3 million in administrative support for New Haven Promise since 2010 and recently committed to an additional $1.3 million over three years starting in 2017, she said. Earlier this year, Albertus Magnus College announced it would contribute up to $20,000 annually to Promise scholars for up to four years, becoming the first private college to partner with the public-private initiative to give specific financial benefits to the students.

Some other critical numbers that represent the immense impact the Foundation has had on the community is that as of the 2017 report, $28.5 million was made in grants and distributions; 46 new funds were created; $53.8 million gifts and transfers were received; and 359 New Haven Promise scholars received scholarships.

For the Clifford Beers Clinic, which works with children and families seeking mental, physical and social wellness for the past 105 years, the Foundation has been instrumental in helping it grow.

“They’ve given us, over the past few years, general operating support, which has been incredibly helpful,” said Clifford Beers CEO Alice Forrester.

“Very few foundations, organizations just give you money for operations. You kind of have to look at that money as gold because when you have program dollars all ... those dollars have to go to the programs, as opposed to the high cost of admin and running an organization like this,” she said.

Forrester added that the Foundation has a keen eye on the city and what issues are important and need attention.

“They’ve picked a topic that’s very critical and important for change in New Haven — incarceration,” she said. “Incarceration rates, the returns, the family structure and so then they did an RFP, requesting applications for that. That’s a really good example of how they see a problem and then they fund for it.”

While Clifford Beers is hopeful it will receive funds to work with its clients on this issue, the final decision of where the funds will be allocated has yet to be determined.

One successful collaboration was the funds received, about 20 years ago, from The Community Fund for Women & Girls to work with girls who experienced sexual abuse. This fund has awarded more than $1 million, since 1995, to advance women and girls.

Since Clifford Beers has been a leader in treating trauma, sexual abuse and domestic abuse in the community, Forrester explained, these funds from the Foundation allowed it to collect very critical data to help continue this work.

“That actually gave us a lot of information and data around the overall problem in the folks we serve, but also allowed us to collect data so that we could then apply for a larger federal grant based on those topics,” Forrester said.

Ginsberg noted the Valley Community Foundation as an example of how important the work of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven is to the individuals that give and receive. Today, the Valley Community Fund today has 190 separate funds.

“Now there’s a Valley institution,” said Ginsberg. “Valley community leaders on the board and doing the work of community in a way that people can really relate to. That’s what this work is about. It’s about tapping people’s community feeling. That’s in the heart. That’s something people feel. It’s something people feel an emotional attachment to.

“Yes, it’s about investment returns and expected grants, but fundamentally it’s about people’s emotional bond to their community,” he said.

The Foundation’s coverage area includes 20 towns, from Milford in the west, Madison in the east and Wallingford in the north.

With this in mind, although there may be more people and more resources to target, the Foundation must be creative in attracting the dollars.

“We have to be much more deliberate about that and much more focused on getting people (to) engage locally and give locally because of the technology today, you can engage and give anywhere in the world,” said Ginsberg.

For Forrester, the Foundation unites the city.

“Coming up around the same time as the Community Foundation, Clifford Beers has always had its interest in our community and how well it’s doing and how our children and families are growing and are healthy,” said Forrester.

“I think the Community Foundation has equally highlighted that in their work with early Head Start and through their community activism in getting leaders in each of the community neighborhoods. All of that work is really all the idea that New Haven is one big city … and I think the Community Foundation has done a really wonderful job of supporting that.”